CEYLAN ÖZGÜN ÖZÇELİK

Ceylan (1980) is an Istanbul-based filmmaker
who studied law at Marmara University, but never practiced.
In 2003, after having worked as a text writer at several TV stations,
she started to produce, write, and host a TV show about cinema which ran for ten years.
Between 2003 and 2015, she produced and hosted culture-art shows for TV and radio,
and furthermore edited behind-the-scenes and award ceremony clips.

In 2013, a book of interviews and media memoirs written by her, was published.
Her movie reviews were published on print media for fourteen years.

She participated in tens of film labs such as
Directing Actors with Adrienne Weiss, Cinematography with Stuart Dryburgh,
Choreography and Movement Direction in Film with Francesca Jaynes
and Acting with Melissa Leo.

In 2015, Ceylan founded the Istanbul-based production company EHY Film to co-produce
her own films and young talents’ projects with whom she has worked.

After having made three shorts, she had written and directed her feature debut KAYGI/INFLAME,
a psychological thriller about memory, 
premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival’s Panorama Special section in 2017.
INFLAME had screened at a further 40 festivals worldwide
and won the Luna Gamechanger Award at SXSW.
Ceylan and the film were covered by the international media outlets including
Variety, Women and Hollywood, Tagesspiegel, ZDF and Politiken.
INFLAME is currently streaming on the U.S. Amazon Prime and Amazon Turkey.

Ceylan has been giving seminars on “Communicating with the Crew” and
“Making a Debut Feature Film” at colleges and events for the last five years.
She has attended to more than 50 film festivals and competitions 
as jury member including Turkey’s largest and foremost events, 
Istanbul Film Festival and Antalya Film Festival.

In 2017, she directed an episode of 7Yüz/SEVEN FACES -a Turkish original miniseries-,
which is a thematic anthology comprising of seven stand-alone episodes examining
"what-if" scenarios, released on the streaming platform BluTV and 
became the first woman filmmaker to direct for a streaming platform in Turkey.

She has been working on her new project, 
CADI ÜÇLEMESİ/WITCH TRILOGY which tells its tales
in different genres and stories by exploring violence against women and little girls since 2017:
The fiction short WITCH TRILOGY 13+ is about a little girl who communicates with a spider
in a dark basement where she is being held captive.
One shot horror/drama made its premiere at the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival in 2019
The second part of the trilogy is a documentary feature, WITCH TRILOGY 15+
portraits two women who had been
subjected to domestic violence by their husbands, and kill the men in self-defense meet the international audience at the DOKUFEST and is streaming on the MUBI. 
The feature fiction WITCH TRILOGY 18+, 
a dark comedy about the mysterious women of a family,
is to be shot by the end of 2023 with an all-female cast.

Ceylan was an artist-in-residence at Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg in 2018
and an SFFILM Rainin Screenwriting grantee in 2019 with 18+.
Also she was one of the twelve candidates for the Résidence du Festival Cannes in 2019.

Apart from the trilogy, her latest feature film, 
STRANGE ABANDONED DERANGED is an absurd portrait of an eco-friendly hotel.  
This hybrid film was entirely shot on Iphone 13 PROMAX and 
is in the post-production stage for quite some time now.